ErikCurre

It's the Attack of the Headless Mutant Sovereign!

I sure hope the new beta comes out tomorrow. I feel as excited as a kid on Christmas Eve! Come on Stardock, end the suspense and put us out of our misery. Just give it to us straight: is it gonna happen, or not?

@Prawl31: if you aren't already in the beta (i.e. didn't buy WoM in 2010), then I believe you can get access by pre-ordering the game.

Thanks for the preview, I love it when you give us the play-by-play for test games. Looking forward to trying out beta 3! The days seem to be passing so slowly...

I would be a bit sad to lose the current city building system. It is one aspect of the game that's really unique and makes the game stand out from others in the genre. In all my time playing WOM, I never even thought to build a "snaking city". The idea didn't cross my mind until I read about it on these forums. That said, I would also be absolutely fine with moving to a 1-tile city system. I love the Civ games and have no issues with their implementation of cities. So I say go with whateve

Good to hear Frogboy! I enjoy all your little posts about fixing bugs here and there - interesting to see how the game keeps improving, one incremental step at a time.

Huh?

I know, the wait is agonizing. With every week that passes, my expectations rise that little bit higher. I have a feeling it will be an update worth waiting for!

All games should be 64-bit from now on. Trying to maintain backwards compatibility really holds things back. Games are meant to be cutting-edge, always pushing the envelope at the forefront of technological development, imho. I'm pleased that FE will be able to at least take advantage of the greater amount of memory available in 64-bit. I would hope that the third game in the Elemental series, if there is one, uses DirectX 11.

Frogboy implied in a post that it might be next week after he gets back from his California media tour.

Good point Heavenfall, maybe that's what happened. An honest mistake. I'm not criticizing, and I like the idea, I just think the way we found out is funny as all heck.

Wow, this news has me awestruck. Just... wow. Talk about dropping a bombshell. I wonder if Derek is done slapping Frogboy with a rubber hose for accidentally leaking this juicy morsel before any official dev journal. Bad froggie, bad! No dinner for you! :-)

This whole "AI pretending to be a human in multiplayer" idea is intriguing, if a little grandiose sounding. I, too, would like to know whatever happened to this. Did it get consigned to the dust-bin of great ideas that are not practical and will never get implemented, or could this be revived in a later expansion if FE does well? I will never try multi-player myself, but this concept is fascinating in its own right...

Phone games, while impressive compared to, say, an original Game Boy game, are still nothing more than simple amusements for me. I would never consider playing one for longer than a few minutes at a time. They're difficult to control and hard on the eyes. But I see a lot of potential for deep, meaningful games on tablet devices, provided that the UI challenge can be overcome. Just look at ID Software's Rage technical demo for the iPad. That was amazing, and rivaled any modern PC game in ter

I think there's been too much nit-picking on this thread about ratings. Yeah, the rating is important for the game to be a success. No, we don't need to spend time trying to rate the game ourselves right now. The focus should be on just trying to make the best game possible. Do a good job, and the good rating will follow as a natural consequence. It's like stock trading: worry too much about making a certain target amount of money, and you'll do terrible. Trade to trade well, not to make m

Thanks Brad for the very detailed explanation. Speaking as a software developer myself, I find these sorts of insights into the inner workings of the game to be very interesting.

How cool would it be to see Grand Admiral Thrawn kicking butt and taking down names? Or even Admiral Daala and the Maw Installation?

Amen to that. Death to prequels. I don't care about what happened before Episode IV, but there is so much good stuff in the books that take place after Return of the Jedi. The future of Star Wars is ripe for movie adaptation. Let the past rest in peace.

The New Republic didn't last that long, if you've read the Star Wars books. After another universe-shattering war that killed off some main characters, the New Republic fell apart and gave rise to the Galactic Alliance. And now that's floundering too. About 100 years after Luke's death, the Sith take over again. History is cyclical. By the way, I really wish someone would make a new Star Wars trilogy that follows the Thrawn storyline in the early days of the New Republic. That would be awe

I've got Win7 64-bit, so if you want to stop supporting XP, fine by me! :-) Although I can understand why some people might be hesitant to upgrade. XP is a nice, stable, robust OS. It's aged well. But cutting edge modern games should not be held back by the limitations of an old OS.

Very cool! The more variety that can be added to the game, the better. Have you investigated the possibility of modding in new wildlands? How about a Land of the Dead bordered by the River Styx? New wildlands would make for an awesome mod, although I suppose you'd have to spend a ton of time on artwork.

I say give the modders their goodies now. We have some excellent modders working on FE, and I'd like their lives to be as easy as possible so there can be some top quality mods already available when the game finally goes gold. How hard can it be to add a flag to the game code indicating whether or not a mod is in use, and then simply ignore crash dumps & error reports from modded games? Just make it clear that Stardock will not support or investigate issues with modded games.

Very creative and interesting items, Heavenfall! Stardock should hire you to do design work on the next Elemental game. I don't usually play games with mods, but I may make an exception with FE and give yours a try.

Sounds great! Can't wait to see what you've come up with Jon!

I love the direction you guys are taking things, and the fact you are willing to take as much time as necessary to make FE a great game! To me, the most interesting way to make factions different would be to have several unique buildings for each faction, which none of the other factions can make. This would go a long way toward giving the cities of each faction a distinct feel. For example, maybe Procipinee could build Magic Academies which would grant cities some sort of magical protection